Some goats, just goating around, watching me mow the field. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Some goats, just goating around, watching me mow the field. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ac...

The other week I was the MC for day 2 of CSS Day conference . It was my first time ever being an MC for a conference! I was so excited and, honestly, very nervous at the start. My hands were shaking a lot, and it's no wonder, as Bruce Lawson had been the MC of the previous day, and that's a tough act to follow. And if I can’t be funny on the spot, I will try to make up for it in other ways . I ended the day with the following: Throughout the day, when introducing our wonderful spea...

SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. Lately I do a lot of my SumatraPDF coding with AI agents: Claude Code, Grok Build, OpenAI Codex. They’re good at writing code. They’re less good at knowing if the code works, especially for GUI apps. The problem: agents don’t drive UI well Say I ask an agent to fix a bug in PDF text search, or in the new feature that translates selected text via an LLM. How does the a...

Hello, Good news today Circuit network Klonan We have several more circuit network improvements to share with you today. Boiler/Heat exchanger circuit connection The Boiler type entities can now be connected to the circuit network, which makes it super easy to set up backup or emergency power conditions. You will also notice the beautiful new Heat exchanger graphics and working animation by Zsolti. Land mine Land mine was less o...

“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry AI gives us an unprecedented ability to add. The danger is that we begin to mistake accumulation for value. Delivery is only the beginning (or be mindful of catabolic collapse) Every new system and feature adds obligations: it must be operated, secured, monitored, documented, integrated, upgraded and eventually replaced or retired. Hac...

In April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, evap leak, & tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanic’s, combined with a delayed shipment. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 I was riding back in a tow truck. In April my car was in the shop three times. It was suppo...

On January 16, 2026, an impossible bug was solved. A bug in a library downloaded over a billion times every year, with a wall of comments asking for help, several hacked-together workarounds, and an open call to the entire internet to please try to solve it. A bug that had been open for 15 years, languishing as the oldest open issue on the project’s GitHub, predating its migration to GitHub even, because it had stymied every person who had tried to tackle it. I myself had already spent a full ...

Last week I saw a talk by Northwestern professor Nina Wieda on the history of the Silk Road , a network of trading routes across Asia active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. I knew of the Silk Road but was surprised by how much it used and fostered various technologies.  It started with a technology that allowed for traveling long distances with limited access to water, better known as a camel. Travel was slow, it could take nearly two years to get from one end (modern d...

Shane Hickey wrote in the Guardian back in May, quote marks added: Criminals use a variety of tactics to convince people that they are from McAfee and are becoming more sophisticated with advances in “artificial intelligence”, according to the company. There’s a broader discussion about the necessity of such AV tools, and McAfee’s own… shall we say, history! If you have a spare half an hour on your Sunday, do check out the history of the company and its eccentric former CEO;...

About 35.1 million Americans worked remotely for pay as of April 2026, and the data settles a long argument: productivity did not fall when work moved home. A Stanford randomized trial of 16,000 workers recorded a 13% performance gain. This post pulls together the current numbers on remote work output, adoption, demographics, and cost. Work From Home Productivity Statistics 2026 – TL;DR 35.1 million Americans worked remotely for pay as of April 2026, per BLS Current Population Survey da...

When I designed my “Which HTML element are you?” quiz , I wrote all of the HTML and JavaScript required to make the quiz work by hand. It took a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun! I used that code as the template for my second quiz, the Blogger Archetype Quiz . With that said, I had to change a lot of values by hand. Working on the second quiz reminded me of my ambition to make a tool that others could use to make similar quizzes. Both the afore-linked quizzes provide several multiple c...

Once upon a time in march 2026 mimi hehe that event was interesting - exciting starts but I do find it a bit weird when people say "The Al did this", "the robot told me" and " it works with the Humans" Jess's talk was most interesting to me mimi Jess's talk was most interesting to me chee yes LOVED this, did i tell you i asked her to submit a demo some days pass mimi it happened again! "Claude did this", "me and Claude" is everyone always consciously making a little joke when...

Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how… Source Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many bio...

Go 1.27 is getting a goroutine leak detector in runtime/pprof . The proposal was accepted in April. A few common goroutine leaks # A goroutine leaks when it blocks on a channel or lock that nothing will ever release, so it lingers for the life of the process. I’ve been using uber-go/goleak to catch them in tests. One is an early return that strands a sender, which I covered in Early return and goroutine leak . It looks like this: func run ( tasks [] func () error ) ...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Regulation Works How Change Happens AI Happens Bibliography · Glossary · A Note on LLMS A lot of people are afraid that AI is going to take their jobs. That fear is legitimate...

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based search to an intelligent research assistant capable of answering complex questions and drafting regulatory documents. more… One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have...

The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world. — Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief : “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control : the Tsar and t...

Old Buildings on the Darro, Granada by David Roberts, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: This week IFP p...

Gentle A gentler world begins in the way you touch your heart. Be soft with the light inside you. Caress your body with this breath. God is nothing else but the place where the sun comes up in your chest. You are the glimmering destination. You are the golden honey daubed on the bread of the ordinary. Whatever is perfect, whatever is heavenly, begins here. — Fred LaMotte Do not bargain to be loved.  Do not negotiate.  When love is withheld as a punishment, as a manip...

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps , with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what , but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why . The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to run read-only SQL queries against data in Datasette, and can run write queries too ...

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected. As I wrote in a previous post , I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before official...

WASHINGTON (June 17, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense technology company building the world’s best autonomous solutions and next-generation aircraft, has been awarded a production contract by the U.S. Air Force to implement Hivemind mission autonomy software for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.   The production award reflects the Air Force’s software-first approach to autonomy and its decision to evaluate mission autonomy as a standalone capability within the CCA program....

Anubis is about to get WebAssembly-based proof of work checks so that administrators can use a non-SHA256 proof of work method to protect their websites. Part of the implementation goals of this work is that the check logic is defined in one place on both client and server. The client and server will then hook into the WebAssembly in order to make sure they're running in lockstep. However, one small problem comes up. What do you do when the client has WebAssembly disabled? I really...